METH RATS

North Carolina’s Totally Slow are a four-piece band working in the grand tradition of melodic and emotional DIY punk. The Wilmington Star recently praised their “ferocious and guttural…wonderfully loud songs,” while the U.K.’s Collective Zine nails it when they call the band, “honest to goodness, grown up punk/indie rock played with tons of heart."

Totally Slow’s members are all veterans of Piedmont’s fertile underground punk scene, cutting their teeth in beloved local bands like Eagle Bravo, Rights Reserved and Torch Runner. They formed in Greensboro in 2012, and now feature drummer Andy Foster, bassist Greg Monroy, guitarist Chuck Johnson, and guitarist/vocalist Scott Hicks, who describes their outlook as, “The devil on one shoulder shooting spitballs at the angel on the other.”

This duality shines through in Totally Slow’s canny balance of melody and bluster, aligning them with early alternative rock like Hüsker Dü, and irreverent pop-punk like Toys That Kill. Excited by the single “Acid Rain,” Razorcake Magazine described their self-titled LP (2013, Self Aware/Headfirst) as “…so well planned and masterful that you might miss (its) genius. This debut goes off without a hitch. It’s perfect."

Praised by PunkNews.org for their “messy, overblown dynamic,” Totally Slow released a follow-up 7” EP in 2014, then spent the next two years touring, playing up and down the east coast with sonically diverse punk luminaries like Night Birds, Iron Reagan, Government Issue, White Lung, and Torche, and even making back-to-back trips to play Gainesville, Florida’s can’t-miss punk gathering The Fest.

In 2016, Totally Slow released their second album, “Bleed Out,” on Self Aware and Negative Fun Records. “Bleed Out” boasts bigger production that adds nuance to the music while maintaining the energy of the band’s debut. Razorcake applauded the record’s “concrete-cutting guitars and tree-toppling drums,” calling it, “powerful, pedal to the metal pop with a surprisingly mature bent.”

Totally Slow continue to grow and develop. In 2018, their longtime label Self Aware is releasing a new EP, which Hicks says, “...goes above and beyond what the last LP did in terms of speed and screaming about politics. It just feels right, given the world we’re living in.”